Barth`s `Friday Book`: Self-indulgent But Provocative Manifestos

The Friday Book-- Essays And Other Nonfiction By John Barth. Putnam, 281 Pages, $17.95

January 13, 1985|By Reviewed by Jack Fuller, the Tribune`s editorial page editor and author of the novel, ``Fragments``.

The subject here is fiction, the telling of tales. For more than a quarter of a century John Barth has been one of this country`s cleverest and most innovative writers. And in this collection of articles, speeches, introductions and occasional pieces, he quite naturally gravitates to the theme that dominates his novels and stories--the artifice of writing. But don`t expect Barth to get straight to the point. He is as reflexive here as ever. His pen writes, and having written, describes what it has just done.

Here, for example, is a passage from an introductory essay explaining

``The Friday Book`s`` title: ``I have . . . revised this paragraph a number of times on a number of Friday mornings here in my workroom overlooking Langford Creek on the Eastern Shore of tidewater Maryland and have not got it quite right yet, have not got it right quite yet, have not yet got it quite, right, but like the tide I shall move on now and return later.``

A little of that sort of thing goes a long way.

And that is one of the problems with this collection. It is so relentlessly fascinated with itself that it makes you understand why vanity once was considered a vice.

The quality of the essays reprinted in ``The Friday Book`` is uneven.

``The Literature of Exhaustion,`` a manifesto written in 1967, is one of the more influential pieces to come out of an American fiction writer of Barth`s generation. Its companion piece, ``The Literature of Replenishment,`` written 12 years later, shows a refinement of Barth`s ideas about tradition and innovation and is a corrective to some of the misunderstandings the earlier essay provoked.

Other articles are annoyingly similar, endless re-examinations of Barth`s own work. One series, entitled ``My Two Problems 1, 2 and 3,`` amounts to a series of scant variations of opening remarks delivered by Barth before doing readings of his work. Undoubtedly the fact that he always seemed to have two problems gives Barth ceaseless delight. It is less fascinating to anyone on less intimate terms with the author.

Yet despite its self-absorption, and despite the repetitiousness of so many of the essays, this is still a provocative book. It calls into question the whole idea of innovation and fashion in literature.

Barth has become identified with a literary movement known as post-modernism, which he describes as a break with the ``bourgeois`` realism of the 19th Century, as well as with the modernist subversion of literary convention in the first half of the 20th. Others mentioned in this connection include Donald Barthelme, William Gass and Thomas Pynchon.

Their strategies are very different, but what unites them in a single category is a restlessness with inherited forms. They seem to feel a horror at being caught owing any reverence to the past. And the effect of this, since life as it is lived has not changed nearly so quickly or radically as the quest for newness demands, is that the work itself turns inward, focusing attention upon itself. These writers refuse to allow the reader to believe that the purpose of writing is anything other than simply to caress language, that is, to caress itself. Oh, and perhaps also to ridicule the naive belief that a writer might be expected to do more.

This has become quite fashionable in some circles, and Barth and others are such brilliant craftsmen that they must be taken seriously. But at the same time, they have helped drive away the audience for serious literature, or at least the large part of the audience that is not attracted to the theologies of academic criticism.

As with contemporary art and music, fiction as practiced by the post-modernists has become obsessed with the creation of new forms and theories. It is as if the practitioners think the only proper subject of writing has become esthetics and the only proper esthetic is denial. Perhaps they have been seduced by the example of science, which glorifies theory and which advances by repudiating what it has inherited. But the analogy is terribly flawed. In science, experiments can fail, hypotheses can be falsified. But there is nothing that makes one formally consistent theory of literature--or one literary style or technique--inherently superior to any other except perhaps sheer novelty. Unlike scientific hypotheses, literary theories cannot be verified or discredited except by fashion.

But if it is only fashion that we are talking about--the literary equivalent of the width of a tie or the length of a hem--then why should any serious writer care? Because a writer writes in order to be read. And since the commercial publishing world is fickle and less concerned with quality than writers would like, the critical community holds the keys to glory, though not necessarily to riches. And since much of the critical community today finds it impossible to imagine writing connecting to any world outside of itself, it is no wonder that writers who want to be taken seriously are tempted to direct their attentions inward.